Hawke thrust the manuscript into Lea’s hands. “We’ll worry about that later. Right now get this thing out of here!” he yelled. “We’re right behind you!”
Lea jumped on the back of Devlin’s dirt bike and clung on tight as he raced away into the night.
Hawke kick-started the other dirt bike and Lexi continued to spray hot lead all over the men. “Time to go, Lex!”
She leaped on the back of the bike and wrapped her arms around Hawke’s waist.
“Go!”
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Hawke revved the bike and took off down the narrow forest path. Behind them, Zito’s men fired into the darkness of the trees but they were firing blind.
“We did it!” Lexi screamed.
“Not yet we didn’t,” said Hawke.
His eyes were focussing hard on the brake light of Devlin’s dirt bike a few hundred meters up ahead. He could see Lea on the back of it, her arms clinging to the Irish soldier for safety as they ripped through the forest.
Then Lexi interrupted his thoughts. “Company!”
Hawke turned and glanced over his shoulder. He saw the bright headlight of another dirt bike bobbing about on the path behind them. “Damn it all!”
They were racing through the heaviest part of the forest now, with the path narrowing every second.
“We have to get them off our tail, Joe!”
“Easier said than done.”
Lexi laughed. “Did you never watch Star Wars?”
“Eh?”
“Return of the Jedi? Speeder bikes?”
Hawke zoomed the dirt bike along the track, his headlight flashing on the trunks of the stone pines. “And your point?”
“My point is, you have to take us off the path! They’ll follow us and that lets Lea get the manuscript off the island.”
Hawke sighed. “I absolutely knew you were going to say something as insane as that.”
“So, do we have a date, or not?”
With no mirrors on a dirt bike, Hawke twisted in the seat and looked over Lexi’s shoulder at the enemy rider behind them. Getting closer now, and then the unmistakable muzzle flash of an automatic weapon. “Fine,” he called back. “Star Wars it is!”
He turned the handlebars and raced the bike off the path. They crashed down in a carpet of pine needles and swerved for a few seconds before he brought the bike back under control.
“I know I talk about having a spirit of adventure,” he yelled over his shoulder, “but this is pushing it even for me.”
They were racing east now, zooming through the pitch-black forest with only their puny headlamp to light their way. Trunks flashed either side of them and they both knew an impact with one would mean a violent and painful death.
The other dirt bike was still behind them and closing fast. The man on their tail fired again and missed by millimeters. The bullets ripped into the bark of one of the stone pines and blasted a cloud of wood splinters and pine sap into their faces.
They burst through it, and then Hawke saw a ditch ahead of them. It approached them rapidly and he slowed the bike to drive down into it. At the bottom he speeded up and raced up the other bank at an angle to decrease the gradient. The next thing they knew they were launching off the top of the other side of the ditch and flying through the air.
They crashed back down to earth in a raging storm of pine needles, dust and two-stroke fumes but there was no possibility of stopping. Just a few meters behind them the other bike was driving down into the ditch, still hot on their tail.
“We need to head west again,” Hawke said. “Get back to the Aurora before they decide to leave without us.”
He revved the bike and skidded away once again just as the enemy behind them was flying up out of the ditch. He raced into the night, his tired eyes squinting now as the trunks flashed passed them at an insane speed. As he was weaving the dirt bike through a dense patch of pines, he realized they were fast approaching a deep gorge, at the bottom of which was a river they had seen on the map back in Positano.
There was no way they could jump it and he struggled to see a way across. Turning back wasn’t an option, and if they decided to drive along the eastern bank they would be pinned down between the river and the enemy gunman.
“What now?” Lexi said.
“There!”
Up ahead he spied a fallen tree trunk that was spanning the river.
“Can we get across it on this?” Lexi said, sounding mildly anxious.
“Only one way to find out, Agent Dragonfly!”
He turned the bike toward the fallen trunk and sprayed another pile of needles and cones up in a massive arc behind them. Racing toward it, he launched the bike up on the fallen trunk and zoomed over the narrow wooden bridge it formed.
“We’re almost there!” Lexi shouted, but then a grenade exploded a few meters to their right.
Hawke, Lexi and the bike were blasted off the fallen trunk and crashed down into the water below.
The explosion threw Hawke clear but the bike’s front wheel had fallen on Lexi’s leg. Hawke scrambled through the water and pulled it away from her and then the two of them waded over to the bank.
“They’re getting closer — at least two,” Lexi said, rubbing her leg. “I can hear them.”
She was right, and when the gunmen opened fire again it was even more ferocious than before. They split up to create two fronts, with Hawke tucking down beneath the fallen trunk spanning the river while Lexi went in the opposite direction and crouched down behind a large cork oak.
Calmly and quickly, Hawke hit the magazine release button, dumped the empty mag and smacked the last one in the grip. Lexi was still backed up against the tree trunk, using it for cover now as the automatic gunfire ripped the surrounding undergrowth to ribbons. She was holding a sidearm in her right hand but the enemy had her pinned down so tight behind the tree she was unable to return fire.
Hawke knew there was a shooter somewhere east of their current position, but he could hear at least two weapons, so where was the other gunman? Another burst of fire gave away the second gunman’s position. To the south of Lexi he saw the telltale flash of a submachine gun’s muzzle as the man opened fire on them once again.
He fired back, but missed. He heard something fly through the air and crash into the undergrowth to his left.
Grenade.
Knowing there was no way he could locate it in all the vegetation in time to throw it back, he turned on his heel and dived away as fast and far as he could along the south bank of the river.
The grenade detonated.
He dived into the river for cover as the explosion blasted tiny, lethal fragments of shrapnel out at hundreds of miles per hour. Safe under the water he spun around onto his back and watched the fireball light up the pine trees stretching high above the river as the grenade burned out.
He had missed the shockwave by a fraction of a second but the river offered only a temporary sanctuary, and while the smoke from the grenade blast was still drifting in the air he saw the silhuoette of the gunman as he approached his hiding place.
Running out of air, he pulled the slider back on his weapon and hoped the waterlogged gun would still fire but he wasn’t hopeful. Just as he twisted in the water to fire the gun he watched as the man crashed over in a heap.
Emerging from the surface of the rushing river, he saw Lexi Zhang standing over the dying man. She fired two more shots into him and killed him stone dead before stuffing the gun into her belt. “I know you frogmen like water, Joe, but do you really think this is an appropriate time to go swimming?”
Hawke waded out of the water and joined her on the river bank. “Funny, Lex. The other shooter?”
“Right between the eyes, baby.”